Adams has been actively blogging about the art of persuasion. He's using the news, and particularly the political news coverage and first hand observations of candidates debates, “as a source of energy” to help us develop a sense of the tells to appreciate the work of persuasion masters.

It's a bit like looking at those illustrations with two images in them -- at first you can see only one, but once you see the second you cannot unsee it.

I was curious to learn whether drawing attention to his system for thinking had an effect on people discovering Scott Adams' book, which was published in 2013. Mostly I buy on Amazon for convenience, but Barnes & Noble is within reasonable distance so I went to see if they stocked How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

How long has it been since you visited a bookstore? Rows of titles next to each other by category, some of them counter intuitive to me. IN other words, they did not make sense. When we buy online, as I often do, we also buy in 3D -- our past preferences, current context, and other data points populate the algorithm.

Where did they hide it? The lady who looked it up said I was the second person that day to ask (at store opening.) She said they restocked copies from the storage closet. This is good news for Scott Adams and for us -- because it a a must-read.

but you can move form a game with low odds to a game with better odds.

[...]

The hard part is figuring out the odds of any given game, and that's harder than it looks.

Because:

Some of the most powerful patterns in life are subtle.

[...]

The point is that while we all think we know the odds in life, there's a good chance you have some blind spots. Finding those blind spots is a big deal.

In organizations we call this knowing what we don't know and it costs us dearly. Adams says that:

The best way to increase your odds of success -- in a way that might look like luck to others -- is to systematically become good, but not amazing, at the types of skills that work well together and are highly useful for just about any job.

This is another example in which viewing the world as math (adding skills together) and not magic allows you to move from a strategy with low odds of success to something better.

golf -- especially if you work in insurance, risk management, and financial services. I suggest scrubbing floors for decompressing, learned it from my mom, but it has less social value

proper grammar -- where do we start? Saw a job description for a senior content marketing strategist with eye for detail as a must start with “principle” as in basic truth when it likely meant “principal” as in key driver

persuasion -- while you wait for your copy of the book, you should catch up on Scott Adams' Master Wizard series at his blog; plus make sure you are high energy and take the higher ground

technology (hobby level) -- this goes beyond learning to code, though there are plenty of free resources to do that (this is from two years ago)

A few years ago, six weeks into her research, Brené Brown hit pause to understand why her questions about connection elicited stories that revealed quite the opposite -- heartbreak, exclusion, disconnection. In other words, she discovered shame. She says:

What underpinned this shame, this "I'm not good enough," -- which, we all know that feeling: "I'm not blank enough. I'm not thin enough, rich enough, beautiful enough, smart enough, promoted enough." The thing that underpinned this was excruciating vulnerability. This idea of, in order for connection to happen, we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.

Her work then became that of deconstructing shame. Six years and thousands of stories later, Brené Brown found that:

There was only one variable that separated the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging and the people who really struggle for it. And that was, the people who have a strong sense of love and belonging believe they're worthy of love and belonging. That's it. They believe they're worthy.

What do people who feel worthy have in common? She found that:

What they had in common was a sense of courage. And I want to separate courage and bravery for you for a minute. Courage, the original definition of courage, when it first came into the English language -- it's from the Latin word "cor," meaning "heart" -- and the original definition was to tell the story of who you are with your whole heart. And so these folks had, very simply, the courage to be imperfect. They had the compassion to be kind to themselves first and then to others, because, as it turns out, we can't practice compassion with other people if we can't treat ourselves kindly. And the last was they had connection, and -- this was the hard part -- as a result of authenticity, they were willing to let go of who they thought they should be in order to be who they were, which you have to absolutely do that for connection.

Connection as a result of authenticity, of being willing to take the first step in relationships and invest in them. This realization led to a breakdown. She says:

I personally thought it was betrayal. I could not believe I had pledged allegiance to research, where our job -- you know, the definition of research is to control and predict, to study phenomena for the explicit reason to control and predict. And now my mission to control and predict had turned up the answer that the way to live is with vulnerability and to stop controlling and predicting.

Reacting to her findings was a first step of a three-part process that led back to more research to understand “what they, the whole-hearted, what choices they were making, and what we are doing with vulnerability.” It turns out we numb it:

You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the other affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then, we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.

One of the things that I think we need to think about is why and how we numb. And it doesn't just have to be addiction. The other thing we do is we make everything that's uncertain certain. Religion has gone from a belief in faith and mystery to certainty. "I'm right, you're wrong. Shut up." That's it. Just certain. The more afraid we are, the more vulnerable we are, the more afraid we are. This is what politics looks like today. There's no discourse anymore. There's no conversation. There's just blame. You know how blame is described in the research? A way to discharge pain and discomfort. We perfect.

We pretend that what we do doesn't have an effect on people. We do that in our personal lives. We do that corporate -- whether it's a bailout, an oil spill ... a recall. We pretend like what we're doing doesn't have a huge impact on other people.

When we expand our perception to feeling okay with being ourselves, we then tap into a deep reservoir of potential. That's when we learn about our opportunity for growth. Brené Brown says:

Because when we work from a place, I believe, that says, "I'm enough" ... then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.

[...] sponsored the largest ever study on gender depictions in family-rated films and children’s television (“I take everything too far,” she admits). The research spanned a 20-year period. It found that for every female speaking character there were three males, while female characters made up just 17% of crowd scenes.

[...]

even in a fictional setting, created from our collective 21st-century imagination, we seem – subconsciously or otherwise – to believe a 17% female representation is the natural state of affairs.

“That ratio is everywhere,” Davis says. “US congress? 17% women. Fortune 500 boards are 17%. Law partners and tenured professors and military are 17% female. Cardiac surgeons are 17%. That’s the percentage of women in the Animation Guild. Journalists, print journalists, are 19% women. So why, across all these major sectors of society, does this percentage of women in leadership positions stall at about the same range?

“I mean, it’s freaky when you start examining it. For decades it’s been the same ratio – we’ve all grown up on that ratio. Could it be that women’s presence stalls at about the rate of female participation in the fiction that we watch? Could it be you get to that level and you feel done? That that looks normal?

“It’s just a completely unconscious image that we have in our heads that women only need to take up a certain amount of space and then we’ve done right by them.”

What if we changed the fiction? Would that create a new normal? This is Ms. Davis's plan.

In her hugely entertaining biography Bossypants, Tina Fey talks about the early days at Saturday Night Live and how a female colleague was passed over for a role when she first got there. She says:

People often ask me about the difference between male and female comedians. Do men and women find different things funny? I usually attempt an answer that is so diplomatic and boring that the person just will walk away.

Something like “There's a tremendous amount of overlap in what men and women think is funny. And I hate to generalize, but I would say at the far end of the spectrum, men may prefer visceral, absurd elements like sharks and robots, while women are more drawn to character-based jokes and verbal idiosyncrasies...” Have you walked away yet?

Here's the truth. There is an actual difference between male and female comedy writers, and I'm going to reveal it now. The men urinate in cups. And sometimes jars.

Tina Fey uses the same math people use to generalize from a sample of one or a few to good effect in the book.

The trick to smashing psychological barriers is to learn how what we think we know because we see one or a few instances of it narrows our views and reduces our options.

When we look back at our careers, at our jobs, even at our lives, some of the things we are most proud of likely fall into two categories:

learning new things

doing good work

We rarely think of these two items as how they translate into energy, but they do. Because what we choose to spend our energy on is what gets energized in return by our contributions.

In the simplest terms, consciously or unconsciously, we grapple with one overarching question: Do we invest or do we disperse? This applies to other, but also to our selves. Our attitudes inform our approach, which in turn creates our culture.

Relationships are an investment that generates renewal energy for both parties (or entities) because we learn as much as or more than we teach through exchanges with others, even through reading about their work or watching a play or a talk.

It's fascinating how much passion is behind so many of the stories and initiatives we share in social networks, for example. But are we still leaving opportunity on the table when we are each looking for a click rather than an opportunity to help expand someone else's work or world?

Kevin Spacey says:

Sir David Leon “dedicated his acceptance speech to the idea of promoting and supporting emerging talent. It turns out he was concerned, perhaps frightened by the film industry’s lack of commitment to developing talent and the greater and greater number of films the studios were making that appealed only to the pulse and not to the mind.”

Appealing only to the click and not the mind. Learning new things is important, and not just in a narrow domain, but going beyond what is to create what is possible. This is how we build renewable energy, from one individual to the other, from one generation to the next.

Learning has been a habit since my early Montessori days. I constantly share ideas, information, and resources with people in my network.

This summer I started Learning Habit weekly to put all of these things in one place -- new posts, articles around the web, and books I’m reading on topics ranging from business, technology, culture, creativity, philosophy, and psychology.

It's free to join and a good way to tap into diverse topics and counter intuitive ideas. Readers say it helps them explore “how to make things happen.”

The video footage below is from the D5 conference where Steve Jobs and Bill Gates shared the stage. Each gets to answer Walter Mossberg's question about what major contribution the other made to the industry.

At about minute 7.5, as Gates is getting deeper into engineering talk, Jobs says, “let me tell the story.” This alone shows how the two leaders' lives converged over the years.

The conversation is peppered with data points about the not too distant past -- for example, Gates says Windows '95 was the year graphics interface became mainstream. According to Gates it was a combination of things, software, hardware, etc.

At minute 17 Jobs talks about how the people at Apple thought that for the company to win, Microsoft had to lose and how he felt that Apple had forgotten how to be Apple, because it didn't have to be like Microsoft.

It's interesting to hear both talk and to observe their styles and language choices -- Jobs being the natural storyteller with the power of persuasion. He says the PC guy in the famous rivalry commercials has a big heart:

“PC Guy is what makes it all work.”

Gates is far more technical. At the time Microsoft was a much larger company than Apple. A fun soundbite from Gates:

“Steve is so known for his restraint.”

At some point Jobs says Apple sees itself as a software company that mostly doesn't compete with what Microsoft does and that they don't believe they will reach an 80% share of the PC market.

Apple’s Macs now enjoy their highest-ever market share in the United States, according to IDC’s third-quarter report: The Mac is the third-largest PC seller in the U.S., with a 13 percent share.

There's a great discussion about local vs. cloud computing, and rich clients on mobile systems at about 30 minutes into the video that hints at where each company is projecting the next few years. Five years out Gates says, “I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that.”

From the exchange:

Gates: The mainstream is always under attack. The thing that people don’t realize is that you’re going to have rich local functionality, I mean, at least our bet, whereas you get things like speech and vision, as you get more natural form factors, it’s a question of using that local richness together with the richness that’s elsewhere.

And as you look at the device, say, that’s connecting to the TV set or connecting in the car, there are lighter-weight hardware Internet connections, but when you come to the full screen rich, you know, edit the document, create things, you know, I think we’re nowhere near where we could be on making that stronger.

Jobs: I’ll give you a concrete example. I love Google Maps, use it on my computer, you know, in a browser. But when we were doing the iPhone, we thought, wouldn’t it be great to have maps on the iPhone? And so we called up Google and they’d done a few client apps in Java on some phones and they had an API that we worked with them a little on. And we ended up writing a client app for those APIs. They would provide the back-end service. And the app we were able to write, since we’re pretty reasonable at writing apps, blows away any Google Maps client. Just blows it away. Same set of data coming off the server, but the experience you have using it is unbelievable. It’s way better than the computer. And just in a completely different league than what they’d put on phones before.

And, you know, that client is the result of a lot of technology on the client, that client application. So when we show it to them, they’re just blown away by how good it is. And you can’t do that stuff in a browser.

So people are figuring out how to do more in a browser, how to get a persistent state of things when you’re disconnected from a browser, how do you actually run apps locally using, you know, apps written in those technologies so they can be pretty transparent, whether you’re connected or not.

But it’s happening fairly slowly and there’s still a lot you can do with a rich client environment. At the same time, the hardware is progressing to where you can run a rich client environment on lower and lower cost devices, on lower and lower power devices. And so there’s some pretty cool things you can do with clients.

Jobs answer on the five years from now:

I don’t know. And the reason I don’t know is because I wouldn’t have thought that there would have been maps on it five years ago, but something comes along, gets really popular, people love it, get used to it, you want it on there. So people are inventing things constantly and I think the art of it is balancing what’s on there and what’s not on there, is the editing function.

[...]

There’s a lot of them surrounding entertainment, but there’s a lot of them that have to do with just sort of figuring how to navigate through life a little more efficiently. And I think, you know, it’s really great when you show somebody something and you don’t have to convince them they have a problem this solves. They know they have a problem, you can show them something, they go, oh, my God, I need this. And I think you’re going to see a lot of things like that happen over the next year or two.

It's fascinating to see the connection points and witness how both Gates and Jobs envisioned the future.

“What gives life to and sustains the corporation resides on the 'outside,' not within its direct control, and the customer is the primary mover of those external realities and forces. It is the prospect of providing a customer with value that gives the corporation purpose, and it is the satisfaction of the customer's requirements that gives it results.”

[Peter Drucker, 1954]

We are customers

Some of us are also employees, managers, CEOs, investors, partners, and service providers to the very same organizations that produce and sell what we buy. With smartphones in our pockets, tools we can access in our browsers and personal clouds, we are also dissolving the duality of buyer and seller.

In response to a Hubspot question about how to plan for mobile in the long term I said:

THE QUESTION TO ME IS HOW DO WE THINK ABOUT THE WAY PEOPLE ACCESS INFORMATION AND BUY GOODS AND WHAT ARE THE IMPLICATIONS?

There’s a collection of Zen koans called the Gateless Gate. Among other things, koans transcend dualism. The traditional sales process is fully dualistic - there’s a buyer, and there’s a seller. We are witnessing the dissolution of the traditional sales role, as recommendation commerce evolves and store- fronts become wherever you happen to be, doing whatever you are doing. Which brings us to the Storeless Store and Saleless Sale.

Doc Searls has been working to provide tools for individuals to manage relationships with organizations for more than a dozen years. His project, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM), is about improving how buyers and sellers relate.

The Industrial Age is nearly two centuries old, and isn't ending. Over that time we have become very good at selling. The flywheels in the selling machine are huge.

So far the Net has offered to sellers countless ways to improve what they're already doing. That's why “the automation people” appear to be more successful than the “conversation people.” They've been at it longer, and the Net gives them more ways to get better at what they already do.

The “conversation people” also have two problems. One is that they work for the sell side. This subordinates their work to sell-side systems, imperatives and defaults. The other is that their tools are inadequate.

Even as many of the tools are inadequate for us to become agents of our own experiences, there is a significant market movement in that direction. The recent popularity of ad blocking apps has fueled an already active conversation over adtech and tracking. Here's a series of posts on debugging adtech assumptions.

The attention economy will crash for three reasons. First, it has always been detached from the larger economy where actual goods and services are sold to actual customers. Second, it has always been inefficient and wasteful, flaws that could be rationalized only by the absence of anything better. Third, a better system will come along in which demand drives supply at least as well as supply drives demand. In other words, when the “intention economy” outperforms the attention economy.

How did we get here?

The deeper and original meaning of agency is acting for one's self.

Dan Pink has been thinking about this question for a while. In 2002, he found that 25 million people already worked for themselves. At the time of his research he was a free agent having left his full time job to write his own byline.

1.) the social contract of work -- in which employees traded loyalty for security -- crumbled;

2.) individuals needed a large company less, because the means of production -- that is, the tools necessary to create wealth -- went from expensive, huge, and difficult for one person to operate to cheap, houseable, and easy for one person to operate;

3.) widespread, long-term prosperity allowed people to think of work as a way not only to make money, but also to make meaning;

4.) the half-life of organizations began shrinking, assuring that most individuals will outlive any organizations for which they work.

Dan was a recent guest on Brian Clark's podcast where they discussed the state of free agent nation in 2015.

The four ingredients Dan wrote about have become solid trends. A trend is defined as the general direction in which something tends to move.

Anthropologist Grant McCracken has studied American culture for 25 years. One of the themes of his work has been how Americans invent and reinvent themselves. His definition of trend is that it is “an emerging consensus” that “must act like an eddy that runs through us, changing thing called 'x' and the activity called 'y'.”

A macrotrend runs thorough the whole culture. In an interesting turn, this year Grant is affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Which is where Doc continues to head ProjectVRM.

When network effects kick in

The image on this post is my interpretation of the night and day experience we can create as conversation agents -- a network of individuals who can act each for one's self. The concept comes from The Intention Economy: When Customers Take Charge by Doc Searls.

Adtech and in many ways what we call personalization engines as mass marketplace tools are experiencing a backlash because in this construct, relationship is demeaned. Transaction is all that matters.

That might be undesirable, but not completely off putting. Anyone who has experienced being followed online by ads for items they researched, or already bought understands the annoyance factor of getting things exactly wrong.

The other side of the coin is for all the big data crunching, context and content talk, and martech investments, customers still don't get what they really want. Fragmented experiences come at a high cost of time and energy.

I was always bemused by the notion that the Internet was able to exist solely because most users did not know they could install an ad blocker. Like removing Flash, using an Ad blocker was a rebellious act but one which paid off only for early adopters. But like all good ideas, it seemed obvious that this idea would spread.

What we never know is how quickly diffusion happens. I’ve observed “no-brainer” technologies or ideas lie unadopted for decades, languishing in perpetual indifference and suddenly, with no apparent cause, flip into ubiquity and inevitability at a vicious rate of adoption.

Watching this phenomenon for most of my life, I developed a theory of causation. This theory is that for adoption to accelerate there has to be a combination of conformability to the adopter’s manifest needs (the pull) combined with a concerted collaboration of producers to promote the solution (the push). Absent either pull or push, adoption of even the brightest and most self-evident ideas drags on.

“Ad blocking offers a real-time example of this phenomenon.” In the post he talks about network effects. The very same effects organizations have been trying to engage to achieve virality for their videos and scale for their programs to grow transaction volume.

Both sellers and buyers want the same thing to happen -- provide and acquire a service or product. But there is no connection point where a matching of what is on offer and true intent wrapped into preferences and real time data can take place.

To benefit from network effects, businesses need to participate to the network marketplace where relationships are what matters.

We need systems that talk to each other. This is where APIs come in.

APIs as personal systems

Phil Windley says, “personal means that I own and control the system, the processing, and the data.” As opposed to personalized where someone else controls what it shows me based on the data it has.

In The Intention Economy, Doc provides a few examples of how that might work. One of them is fairly complex, but worth thinking about because it creates a vivid picture of how personal systems would work with organization's system to make it a win-win for everyone.

Here's the example(emphasis mine):

Now for the complex scenario, involving a salesman we’ll call Bob, who works for a company we’ll call BigCo. Bob lives in Denver and is going on an overnight business trip to see a client in San Francisco.

Bob’s personal cloud has these apps on the inside:

TripEase (which doesn’t exist yet, but something like it will)

Calendar

Expensify

OpenTable

TomTom

Quickbooks

Singly

The APIs on the outside are the exposed competencies of:

Marriott

United Airlines

Avis

Visa

Salesforce

We start as Bob confirms an onsite visit with his San Francisco client.

When Bob schedules the meeting in his calendar, an appointment event is sent to his personal cloud. Evented applications and services Bob uses are listening for these events and respond by taking action on Bob’s behalf. In this case, Salesforce fills out appointment details in his calendar, such as Bob’s client’s office location and directions for parking nearby.

Meanwhile, rules in Bob’s TripEase app react to the same event, recognize the appointment is in San Francisco and that Bob will need travel arranged. TripEase knows Bob’s travel preferences (e.g., a single room at a Marriott hotel, a compact car from Avis, an aisle seat on United, and a request to United for an upgrade to business class if a seat is available) and marks available choices from each on his calendar. TripEase also knows that Bob has memberships in loyalty programs with each of those companies and also with other companies, in case Bob’s first-choice preferences aren’t available. Bob sees the choices, makes them, and TripEase puts those in the Calendar.

In the background, TripEase also raises a new business trip event, causing Expensify to bring up an expense journal, so an accounting of expenses can be made at the end of the trip. So, when Bob gets to the airport and buys a sandwich with his Visa card, Expensify automatically adds that purchase to this trip’s expense journal. And, because Expensify and TripEase are cooperating, Expensify has more context for purchases and can make better categorization decisions without Bob’s involvement.

After landing in San Francisco, Bob turns on his smartphone, and its location function raises an event indicating Bob is now at SFO. Avis hears and responds to Bob’s location event by preparing Bob’s preferred car and paperwork.

To help with that, TripEase also lets Avis know that Bob will decline Avis’s insurance offer and return the car with a full tank of gas. If Avis does not already have this information, TripEase fills Avis in on the facts, and auto-signs Avis’s agreement, so Bob doesn’t have to bother with that. TripEase also puts Bob’s appointment destination in the TomTom app on Bob’s smartphone.

After meeting with his client, Bob drives to the Marriott and parks there. When he arrives at the reception desk, he is greeted by name and given his preferred room (on the north side of a high floor) and a key to his room and the exercise facility. He also receives a notification from Open Table that two of his favorite restaurants have reservations available. He decides on one and proceeds to his room. Open Table also sends an e-mail and a text to his client with reservation information.

All these connections are made in the background, on Bob’s behalf, by apps and services that he or his fourth party have already programmed, using KRL#.

After checking out of the hotel (automatically, of course), driving his car back to Avis at SFO, flying back to Denver, and driving back to his house, TomTom tells TripEase that Bob has completed the trip and raises an end-of-trip event.

Expensify sees the event and moves Bob’s journaled expenses—air fare, hotel, rental car, gas purchases, dinner, personal driving mileage (to and from the airport), and parking fees—from his trip journal to his expense report. After reviewing and approving the report, Bob tells Expensify to send it to BigCo’s Salesforce system, which is in the cloud Salesforce keeps for BigCo.

Expensify has also sent copies of expenses to Bob’s own personal cloud, which comprises these:

His personal data store (PDS), which is where he keeps his personal data, fed from many sources, including all the apps and services mentioned. While Bob could keep his PDS on a self-hosted server, his preference is to use Singly, a fourth-party he pays to keep his data and relationships sorted out, secure, and up to date. Singly also has a rules engine he can use, but he isn’t limited to that one alone.

His personal API. This can live anywhere, but would most likely live with his PDS.

His rules, written in KRL.

His memorandum book.

His journal and ledger, kept by QuickBooks.

His memorandum book is the modern version of what for centuries was the first step in double-entry bookkeeping: the place where everything that happens is first written down. This helps Bob (and his tax preparer) remember what happened when, as well as what it cost. From there, it goes to his journal and then to his ledger, which can generate the usual reports. Meanwhile, he has an accountable and auditable trail of records.

Would we not want to have a personal system like this? Where our settings combined with our actions to trigger the delivery of a service and we get to understand our own patterns, preferences, and improvements based on data. A better version of the quantified self, a two-way version of the much touted Uber experience.

This is all built on relationships where we decide what we share and with whom. Richer experiences reduce the role of luck for organizations as well, imagine doing forecasts on actual bookings through APIs -- and take care of bribery programs and of the expensive guesswork in the process.

If we had the gift of knowing the strategy we should use to make good decisions, would we use it? It turns out we have it, but we don't use it.

+

What is strategy?

We have different definitions of strategy floating around business halls. Many describe what strategy does -- it recognizes the nature of the challenge, it creates strength through its coherence, it's unexpected, it needs to be responsive to innovation and ambition.

The paradox of choice

We live at a time of abundance -- we have more marketing and business technologies, media channels, and product, entertainment, service options than we have time in a day to try out.

Focus is better, yet focus is hard. Why? One reason is the abundance of choices. It paralyzes us. As psychologist Barry Schwartz says in The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, the central tenet of western societies -- freedom of choice -- has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.

We are likely familiar with many of the examples he cites from research -- too many brands of cereal on the shelf to choose from, too many product features to evaluate, etc.

Each of these scenarios depletes us cognitively, especially after a log day at work. Cognitive load explains the popularity of smartphones over fancier cameras -- simpler methods to capture beautiful moments -- and how Instagram won over existing social networks -- simpler ways to share photos.

While picking the wrong salad dressing is likely no big deal, the problem is when we are called to make choices of consequence. The central thesis of the book is about strategic choice. Schwartz says how we choose depends on whether our strategy is to be “maximizers or satisficers:”

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximizer.

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer.

To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better.

Picking a course of treatment for our health is an example of a more complex choice. With the Affordable Care Act signed into law (after the book's publication) many had to learn to navigating the current system to choose an appropriate level of health coverage for the first time.

Many of us are likely somewhere in between maximizer and satisficer. Regardless of our directional strategy, as part of the human race, we are subject to biases and assumptions. Which explains why our choices may seem irrationally emotional and not follow a personal strategy.

Why we make poor decisions

Part of the analysis-paralysis for decisions or difficulty in making choices problem stems from our beliefs of what will make us happy. In turn this leads to bad decisions. Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert says that is because we don't know how to calculate what is best for us:

We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do -- in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic. And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be a tremendous gift.

It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli. And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference.

Now, this is Bernoulli's gift. This is a direct quote. And if it looks like Greek to you, it's because, well, it's Greek. But the simple English translation -- much less precise, but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say -- was this: The expected value of any of our actions -- that is, the goodness that we can count on getting -- is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us.

In a sense, what Bernoulli was saying is, if we can estimate and multiply these two things, we will always know precisely how we should behave.

Gilbert provides many examples to explain why we don't, he says:

There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success.

Our loss aversion prevails over rational arguments of gain, for example. We neglect to consider how else we could utilize money based on current circumstances rather than past experiences.

Now, retailers knew this long before anybody else did, of course, and they use this wisdom to help you -- spare you the undue burden of money. And so a retailer, if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for eight, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do?

Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. So, they will opt for the item in the middle. If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the $33 wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison.

So I'm telling you something you already knew: namely, that comparison changes the value of things. Here's why that's a problem: the problem is that when you get that $33 bottle of wine home, it won't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to.

The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, where we're trying to estimate how much we'll like things, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them.

This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions.

When we add the time dimension to choices, they become even more difficult. For example, making investment decisions, or choosing a course of studies or a job -- not everyone makes a big excel spreadsheet like Marissa Mayer made.

How to decide better

If we want to become more effective at making decisions, say the Heath brothers, rather than shooting from the hip or getting paralyzed by choices, we can learn to adopt a more objective way of weighing our options.

We can learn to shift our attention or pause to gain better perspective and move forward. Other techniques they recommend are exploring alternative points of view, recognizing uncertainty, and searching for evidence that contradicts our beliefs. These techniques require effort and discipline to automate.

Which is why the book also provides more general guidelines to get started. There is something we can do to respond to the four villains of decision making:

to avoid narrow framing, we should widen our options

to keep confirmation bias in check, we should reality-test our assumptions

to hedge short-term emotion, we should attain distance before deciding

to counter overconfidence, we should prepare to be wrong

Reframing our goals is also helpful.

For example, they say start by asking “what do I want out of life?” then consider “what are the best options to get me there?” That includes something I have found supremely helpful, which is finding someone who has solved that same problem before. With the caveat that we should also consider “what would have to be true?” for us to achieve similar results (one of the reasons why following best practices may not work.)

The Heath brothers say there is a problem with focus we should be aware of:

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy -- when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there's no natural corrective for this; life won't interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.

This is an issue when we want to be innovative, or are still at the stage of figuring out the best question to answer with our strategy, because we run the risk of creating a solution in search of a problem to solve.

To make better decisions, at a minimum, we can make it easier for people to disagree with us, we can ask questions that are more likely to surface contrary information, and we can check ourselves by considering the opposite.

If we say that truth is important to us, then we should also have the humility to recognize how we are very good at dispensing advice, yet do poorly at taking it. We can learn to make better decisions by becoming more aware of our behavioral gaps and using simple techniques to do better.

Decisions are a means to an end -- achieve our goals. We make ourselves happier when we learn to become more effective in our choices.

What we all seek

In Stumbling on Happiness, Dan Gilbert outlines the shortcomings of our imagination -- how we have the ability and desire to imagine our future, yet how little we know about it to make it happen. The shortfall is our predictive ability. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us happiness.

Dubberly Design office, in collaboration with Satoko Kakihara, Jack Chung, and Paul Pangaro created a model of play “built on the idea that play is a type of conversation.” The interaction between to people or teams, in person or virtual creates a shared world in their imagination.

Through the act of playing the participants engage in a learning cycle [image above.]

What's interesting about this model is that engagement is a result of acting as a contribution to a conversation that builds a shared world:

Play requires individuals to actively engage in conversation.

Engagement reflects something of the quality of play. A highly engaged individual is in the “zone”—has achieved the mental immersion psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi terms “flow,” where challenge matches skill—and both boredom and anxiety are avoided. Individuals reach “flow” when they achieve sufficient mastery to act with little or no thought about the technique or the steps involved.

As engagement wanes, conversation suffers and may fail. Without engagement, conversation is not possible.

Engagement arises as play arises; it is both a prerequisite and a result. Engagement tends to be self-sustaining. Engagement contributes to fun; fun encourages further play; further play continues engagement. Yet play is also fragile; individuals may lose interest and disengage if they are not having fun or if they are distracted by forces outside the conversation.

When we observe the full model [below], the context creates the opportunity for play to begin with an act. The three areas we can develop further with play are relationships, work/knowledge, and self.

From the introduction:

We play to have fun. We play to develop relationships, learn new things, and know ourselves better. Play can be cooperative, competitive, even selfish. It occurs in a variety of times and places, beginning when we are children and continuing throughout our lives. Play is an activity through which we exercise and develop our creativity; it is a source of innovation and new ways to solve problems.

Yet when we try to define play, we face the challenge of articulating something that has come naturally to us our whole lives. Simple questions puzzle us: What is play? What does it comprise? How does it begin and end? What makes good play?

Can there ever be bad play?

This poster proposes a model of play, defined as a conversation between individuals that creates a shared world in their imaginations and leads to fun. The model takes the form of a concept map: a web of terms that relate to, and together explain, a single concept. Terms form the nodes of the map, and propositions link and define the relationships between nodes.

In play the overarching goal is to have fun—and to keep having fun— to continue playing. Play takes place between individuals, where an individual can be a single person, an entire team of people, a particular perspective within one person, or a virtual person.

The conversation begins with an act, and each act advances the conversation. An act can be throwing a ball in a game of catch or serving tea while playing house. An act by one individual is observed and assessed by the other, in preparation for the next act.

As the conversation grows, it builds a shared world in the individuals’ imaginations. The shared world requires their engagement and creates meaning for them as they inhabit and develop it. A young boy playing with a toy elephant (with a second perspective in his mind speaking for the elephant) creates meaning by referring to different parts of the room as different parts of the world, as he and his elephant travel together. The significance of the shared world increases as he feels that he and his elephant are becoming better friends.

Eventually engagement wanes, and the conversation ends. The end crystallizes play’s benefits and harms, the experience it delivers. Experience guides individuals as they continue to learn and interact with others. Experience affects how they will play in the future—and also their lives outside play.

Play is a tool to experiment with the active construction of new worlds:

Play provides space for experiment—opportunity to try new things or even try on new personas. The freedom and exhilaration we feel in play may help us create. Simply playing—fooling around, messing about, tinkering, hacking—invites juxtapositions, provides experience, and reveals new points of view. Who can say where play will lead?

This model of play only begins to address how play affects our lives, our work, and our growth, but perhaps it also begins to point out the importance of—and even the need for—more play in our lives.

We are often conflicted about whether to multitask or single-task -- arguments have been made on behalf of each.

In the life-changing Wherever You Go, There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn has an example of “the impulse [that] frequently arises [in us] to squeeze another this or another that into this moment.” He says:

I've learned to identify this impulse and mistrust it. I work hard at saying no to it. It would have me eat breakfast with my eyes riveted to the cereal box, reading for the hundredth time the dietary contents of the contents, or the amazing free offer from the company. This impulse doesn't care what it feeds on, as long as it's feeding. The newspaper is an even better draw, or the L.L. Bean catalogue, or whatever else is around.

It scavenges to fill time, conspires with my mind to keep me unconscious, lulled in a fog of numbness to a certain extent, just enough to fill or overfill my belly while I actually miss breakfast. It has be unavailable to others at those times, missing the play of light on the table, the smells in the room, the energies of the moment, including arguments and disputes, as we come together before going our separate ways for the day.

This happens more frequently than we'd like to admit in meetings -- for example an executive catching up on email while a colleague is presenting a new program to a client for discussion. It's a behavior that leads to partial dis-attention, where the party grabs onto fragments of conversation thus missing participating in the creation of it.

“I like to practice voluntary simplicity to counter such impulses,” says Kabat-Zinn:

and make sure nourishment comes at a deep level. It involves intentionally doing only one things at a time and making sure I am here for it.

[...]

Voluntary simplicity means going fewer laces in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.

Shifting from a reactive to a proactive or responsive mode is a big challenge for businesses today. How do we manage at a broader level? Helps bridge the gap between the kind of response we are expecting and that we go instead.

Rather than trying to over haul how we operate, we can start by choosing simplicity in small ways like slowing everything down, or choosing to do nothing for an evening. It's something we need to practice, says Kabat-Zinn:

I practice saying no to keep my life simple, and I find that I never do it enough. It's an arduous discipline all its own, and worth the effort. Yet it is also tricky. There are needs and opportunities to which one must respond.

A commitment to simplicity in the midst of the world is a delicate balancing act. It is always in need to retuning, further inquiry, attention. But I find the notion of voluntary simplicity keeps me mindful of what is important, of an ecology of mind and body and world in which everything is interconnected and every choice has far-reaching consequences.

You don't get to control it all. But choosing simplicity whenever possible adds to life and element of deepest freedom which so easily eludes us, and many opportunities to discover that less may actually be more.

Conversation Agent

Conversation Agent focuses on business, technology, digital culture, and customer psychology. At Conversation Agent LLC, I help organizations and brands that want to build better customer experiences tell a new story.